My project attempts to explain Klara’s religious perspective of her world as well as suggesting the truth to its existence within Klara and the Sun. I imitated the Ancient Egyptian art style because I found the mysticism and purpose behind it to be very relevant to Klara and the Sun. According to E.H. Gombrich in The Story of Art, Egyptian art had a very strict set of rules in portraying the human body because “strict adherence to the rule had something to do with their magic purpose. For how could a man with his arm ‘foreshortened’ or ‘cut off’ bring or receive the required offerings to the dead” (61). Since Egyptian Art was used to immortalize the dead, it did not attempt to portray a person as they would actually appear in a moment, but rather to capture the complete form of the individual. Egyptian art resonates with my goals for my project because I am not striving to portray a particular instance in Klara and the Sun, but rather to portray a relationship that universally applies to the whole of the book. The symbolic representations of different aspects of the story, which may seem unrelated to each other, creates a cohesion between them that portrays the story as a unified religious narrative.
There are several particular instances in the book that I wanted to reimagine as an essential part of the book’s religious fabric. The primary one is Klara’s imagining of the sun. She notes that the Sun seems to go to rest at the barn, saying “I wonder why the Sun would go for his rest to a place like that” (56). I made this observation a reality in my drawing by putting the Sun, depicted as the Egyptian god Ra, in a structure that is meant to represent the barn. I chose to depict the Sun in this way because it aligns with the human characteristics that Klara believes the Sun possesses. In my depiction, the sun is a powerful god with human-like autonomy bestowing his ‘nourishment’ on Josie. Klara acts as an intercessor for Josie, kneeling before the Sun with her offering of her “precious fluid” (269). I purposefully made her larger than Josie, and the Sun larger than her, in order to show the religious stature of each character, as was the practice in Egyptian art. Klara is acting as an intermediary between the Sun and the humans, most notably through the Sun healing Josie.
Below this scene is the bull from the trip to Morgan Fall’s, which Klara believes must be a being completely separated from the Sun. She states that “at that moment it felt to me some great error had been made that the creature should be allowed to stand in the Sun’s pattern at all, that this bull belonged somewhere deep in the ground far within the mud and darkness, and its presence on the grass could only have awful consequences” (100). While this particular instance is inconsequential to the plot of the story, it provides crucial insight into Klara’s religious worldview. She now believes in an opposing force to the Sun, a force which I wanted to depict in my drawing. I included the sheep that Klara saw on her trip from Morgan Falls as a contrast to the bull because “these creatures had filled [her] with happiness that day, helping to erase the memory of the terrible bull” (270). I depicted them as being “oddly suspended” (270) in the air as Klara saw them in the picture. I wanted to make this illusion a reality in my drawing to emphasize how my drawing diverges from presenting reality in traditional or expected ways. When the circumstances of the book are considered through a supernatural or fantastical lens, there is no distinction between such illusions or mundane observations and Klara’s religious worldview.
Gombrich, E.H. The Story of Art. New York. Phaidon Press Inc.
‘Ra’ reference photo link.